From Space Ninjas to Eternals...
Digital Extremes is one of those companies that, although they've been around since the early 90's, they haven't gotten much coverage until the last 5 years. Starting off as an assistant in the creation of Epic Games' Unreal Tournament in 1993, Digital Extremes was founded by James Schmalz. Schmalz, who worked alongside other video game giants like Cliff Bleszinski in the early days of video games, founded DE, as it is known, in London, Ontario. The games studio has often been credited as being the assistant in multiplayer sections of AAA-tier video games, as well as generally polishing up UI and game bugs.
Besides some stand-alone Pinball projects that Schmalz made, the company doesn't actually have a sole accreditation until 2005, when the studio made the spiritual sequel to 2004's Pariah, the game known as Warpath.
At the time, in 2005, the only news release Digital Extremes put out was a 7-minute tech demo of a new game engine they were planning on using for future projects. With their main target in the seventh generation of video game consoles being the PS3, their mainline project, Dark Sector was unveiled with less than stellar reviews. Digital Extremes released a post-mortem on their main site about audio design, then moved on quickly.
News and PR stepped up from that point on, as heavy amounts of posts from DE came in from both Facebook and Twitter; the main two platforms that they use for their related pages and updates. These posts where they assisted in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 were nowhere near as strong as the support they gave to The Darkness 2, which became their third game where they were the sole accreditation. This outreach came alongside a YouTube channel that had proper demos and advertisements as well as support for different local charities and office commendations.
It wasn't until the release of Warframe, however, that Digital Extremes perfected the model for their public relations. On top of having pages solely devoted to the game, DE began a livestream that would broadcast different changes made to the game, known as PrimeTime, to present changes and debate further content. Early beta design boards that players could buy into made Warframe have a very competitive and friendly community that allowed for Rebecca Ford, (seen left) lead in PR for the game, a fantastic basis to have conversations that could be heard throughout the forums.
As time has gone on, a new Beta, known as The Amazing Eternals, has been released. What DE plans to do with the game, I'm uncertain, but after the sucess of Warframe, I don't have my doubts.
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